I will easily accept that patents do stifle innovation to an extent. My point was that the stifling is not so obvious as to warrant a complete rethinking of pat

I will easily accept that patents do stifle innovation to an extent. My point was that the stifling is not so obvious as to warrant a complete rethinking of patents in these cases. If we allow that patents on hardware have a place in the world, then patents on software directly follows from this. Software is not special in this regard (the "math" argument is tiring). What is not clear is that a patent free environment would be preferable either, as the inner workings of modern processor tech might be kept trade secrets or worse, no one bothers to develop this technology at all. It is decidedly not obvious that software patents are some sort of exception to this rule, and its definitely not because software can be reduced to math (as everything can).